The Computational Semantics Laboratory at CSLI is headed by Stanley Peters and focuses on dialogue system applications and research. Currently, we are participating in the DARPA-funded CALO project, working to do robust multimodal meeting dialogue understanding for a persistent office assistant.

Our talk will touch on several recent and ongoing areas of our investigation in multi-party meeting understanding. These include: (1) an ontology-based multimodal discourse annotation scheme, (2) our meeting annotation tool, (3) some annotations of the ICSI and ISL meeting corpora that we have done, (4) preliminary results for automatic topic segmentation, and (5) future plans for annotation and automatic analysis of argumentation and decisions.

Speaker Bio:

John Niekrasz studied Symbolic Systems as an undergraduate at Stanford University, where he worked on speech and signal processing algorithms for use in electronic music composition. Subsequently, he joined The Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh as a research student. There, he investigated speech production models for whispering and singing. Currently, he works for Stanley Peters at CSLI, Stanford, engineering dialogue-understanding systems for multi-party meetings. His web page can be found at http://cujo.stanford.edu/~niekrasz/.